NYC Subway — The Accessibility Gap in Three Dimensions

One direction only

Accessible uptown or downtown, not both — Manhattan-bound only, out in the boroughs. A rider can enter the system here and be unable to make the return trip.

—complexes accessible in a single direction

—average weekday riders at those complexes

No accessible station

Ranked by average weekday ridership — the number of people affected, not the number of stations.

—complexes with no accessible station

—of all weekday entries system-wide

Core vs. everywhere else

Share of each area's own weekday riders entering at a fully accessible complex. Higher is better.

Two true readings

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Both are in the data. They answer different questions, so they are kept apart rather than averaged into one sentence.

Method

Grain: Station complex. The MTA stations dataset is station-level, so member stations are grouped by Complex ID before anything else. A complex is full only if every member station is accessible, none only if no member is, and partial otherwise — which covers both a station coded partial and members that disagree with each other.
Supply: Distinct weekday trips serving the complex, from GTFS. Counted once per station, not once per directional platform, so 101N and 101S do not double-count.
Demand: Average weekday fare transactions from the hourly ridership dataset. Weekends and observed holidays excluded from both numerator and denominator. The transfers column is not added — those riders are already counted at their origin complex.
Pressure: Riders per scheduled weekday trip. An index of street entries per train, not passengers per car: terminals and transfer-heavy complexes read low.
Excluded: The Staten Island Railway ships as a separate GTFS feed, so its complexes would carry ridership against zero supply. Excluded rather than shown broken.
Polarity: Every accessibility share on this page is labelled as the share entering at a fully accessible complex. The complement is a different number and is never shown under the same label.
Vintage: ADA status changes as stations are retrofitted. This page is a snapshot of the embedded month, not a live feed.

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